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Hello guys!!
Surfing around the Dakka forum, I see that you guys talk a lot about Ink, what is it?
Is Ink a kind of GW's paint or just the normal one used in pens? I use Tamiya paint, I don't know much about the Citadel and Vallejo stuffs.
Thanks a lot!

Ink is a painting medium which is like a wash but generally has a glossy finish. Lots of companies have their own brands. I use generic artists ink for thing like lenses, visors etc...

GW used to do 'Inks' in their older lines of paints. The behaved kind of like washes and glazes.. could become either or with a bit of adjustment the right way.
What people mostly mean when we say inks around here is artists acrylic inks, such as those made by Daler Rowney (FW Inks) or the ones made by Liquitex (Liquitex Ink!)
Mixed with the right amounts of medium and diluted the right amount gives a rather nice wash style of paint.

Yep, basically transparent paint, sold in art supply stores. Pretty it's like watercolor, and I do think it's the same stuff what marker pens use, as markers are translucent as well - they need to be applied on white paper.

I'm thinking the main difference is that a wash = a stain. If you put a black wash on a white model, whole model (including high spots) will be light gray and deep spots will be black. Ink doesn't like to stay on high spots, so if you put black ink on white model, the high spots will remain white and black will run into the deep spots.

That's almost the exact opposite of the difference between inks and washes.

Washes tend to be a thinner pigment density, with an anti-surfactant to encourage pooling in recesses and flowing off of high points, inks have a heavier pigment density and are more likely to stain the whole surface (but with a bias towards the recesses as they are thin and tend to flow into low points)

It is technically possible to paint with ink, it would be much, much harder to do so with a wash.

It is important to know that there are various types of inks.

The acrylic inks are compatible with acrylic paints and can be mixed and thinned the same way.

Shellac and other inks are made of different stuff and cannot be treated the same way, though you can put them on top of dried acrylic paint safely.

 azreal13 wrote:
That's almost the exact opposite of the difference between inks and washes.

Washes tend to be a thinner pigment density, with an anti-surfactant to encourage pooling in recesses and flowing off of high points, inks have a heavier pigment density and are more likely to stain the whole surface (but with a bias towards the recesses as they are thin and tend to flow into low points)

I'd say that's two sides of the same coin. Yeah inks are a lot stronger from the bottle, but I've usually seen inks used quite thin, when they tend to have that 'everything runs into the crack' style. I guess washes are thin inks with more surfactants etc. added, so you tend to see more of a gradient in tone.